During my childhood I grew up in a moderately sized beach community on the coast of Southern California. My house was situated midway down a dead-end city street and I lived there with my parents and brother. We owned a green Ford station wagon, a family dog, and ordered many of our clothes out of the Sears catalog. In this and a host of other ways, my family members lived the life so many other middle class, nuclear families lived.

There were the LaDues who lived next door to the east, the Coreys to the west, and the Hills to the south of us. Because our home backed up to a baranca, a river bed lined in Eucalyptus trees, there were no neighbors living immediately behind us. And that did not matter a bit. Our neighbors included professional daddies and stay-at-home mommies who worked hard to raise decent children and enjoy happy family lives. There were a host of playmates living on our street alone and I could be seen running back and forth across the street as I played with the neighboring children.

Because sunny Southern Californi lived up to its name, I have few memories of playing in the rain and there was certainly no need for a mudroom. We stayed relatively clean while playing on the lawns and sidewalks of Byron Avenue. There were avocado and orange trees that gifted us with fruit, but no bunnies or blackberries, no shaggy mane mushrooms to collect or rhododendrons to deadhead. We ground up the yellow spadix of calla lillies to make “corn” and made puppets from the colorful bird of paradise plants that grew around our homes. We wrote on the sidewalks with ice plant leaves and brought our mothers bougainvillea blossoms for our tables.

Perhaps you can understand my initial panic, nine years ago, when my youngest daughter announced she wanted a horse more than anything in the world. The closest I had ever come to experiencing anything farm-like were the years I raised a silky hen named Henny Penny who sported a hairdo that resembled comedianne Phyllis Diller.

The moment one of my own uttered the word “horse” I knew I was venturing way out on a limb.

“How can we do this?” I asked my husband.

“How can we not?” my husband replied.

As we talked and warmed up to the possibility, I had some admitting to do. I had to admit that I had learned a lot since moving to the end of a country road in the Pacific Northwest. I now knew something about water wells and septic systems. Canning blackberry jam and boiling fresh crab. I had grown to love coffee and decided that adding blond highlights to my hair was a perfectly acceptable alternative to sun bathing.

But a horse? I had absolutely no experience and certainly no expertise. And when I dared to talk horses with anyone, I fumbled with my words. I did not know a Quarter Horse from an Arab. When one owner told she did great in Western equitation classes but struggled with English pleasure, I nearly threw in the towel.

Once I erroneously called hay “straw.” I jumped like a scared rabbit every time a horse blew air through its nose. I rubbed horse faces when I should have stroked necks to see if they were receptive to my touch.

And yet, in time, I began to feel more comfortable and I opened my heart to learning about horses. I eventually warmed to the idea of horse ownership and not only do I today eagerly learn enormous amounts from my daughter whose expertise far exceeds my own, but I have come to adore the paint horse gelding who enhabits our pasture and comes when I holler his name.

Whenever I need to step away from my life for a few minutes, I can nearly always be found gazing out at this gentle giant or better yet, walk outside to encircle his neck with my arms and breathe in his earthy smell.

How similar finding my faith has felt like discovering a love for this horse, who absolutely scared me at first. I was scared all those years ago to become a Christian. I did not know much about the Bible and I was uncertain how such a decision might change my family’s dynamics. I wondered if God would ask me to do really hard things and I did not know how I would learn to recognize or experience Him on a daily basis. I did not understand many of the things Christians said. I was unfamiliar with church ways.

Then I began to detect God’s presence, which I came to understand was His spirit. I began to view the world differently and see all sorts of ways I could share His love with people around me. Normal things seemed filled with spiritual implications and I valued my everyday experiences more than ever before. I ventured outside my circle of comfort and discovered a life I valued even more than the life I knew.

In Psalm 15:11 the psalmist writes to God: “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures. “There is often a surprising mixture of joy and fear that can accompany faith. Let’s identify some of those factors next week. For now, be bold. Be daring. Try a little faith.